The Victory and The Mary Rose

Di has won a yearly pass to the Docklands in Portsmouth, so we headed out there to make a day of it. First we met up with one of my Mastermind buddies, Gemma, for a quick coffee and then she had to go and pick her little girl up and we headed out for some sea worthy adventures.

Now, I must admit, my naval history is very patchy to say the least but we still had a fun day.

When we were waiting for Gemma, we introduced a janken game (rock, paper, scissors) to R, then they played it as the scooted along a torpedo - as you do!

We finally made into the actual Docklands, it's a big site with plenty to see, in fact, it is doubtful that you could possible see everything in one day, there is so much there, I think it would take several trips to cover it all. We decided to head toward The Mary Rose but we came across Nelson's Victory first...

It was pretty impressive and there were staff dotted around so we quizzed them about things, did you know that Nelsons body we pickled in a barrel of brandy to help preserve his body until they reached land? I didn't!

Of course the boys LOVED it and they had the ship set up like it would have been back in the day. 

Next up was The Mary Rose, which is housed in a 20 million pound building! They have set it up quite cleverly, the one side of the museum has the remains of the ship, contained in a special until to dry it out and the other side they had the artifact's on display. It is dark inside and no flash photography allowed, so I don't really have any decent pictures. Ebi-kuns favourite bit was meeting the ships doctor who explained how to use all the various bits of equipment and trying out the long bow equipment...

After all that history we needed a break and headed over to the game centre, cue random photo...

I think everything inside was free, Ebi-kun opted for the climbing wall that actually moves and tilts which was fun (I wanted a go!) R wasn't big enough for this so he went on a smaller kids adventure climbing thing. Then we met up for a truly horrible helicopter simulator experience!

We finished off with a boat ride around the dock, the boys were driving and we were in a police boat, so we tried arresting a few people too! Of course the boys thought it was great, all that was missing was a cooler of beer in the back of the boat!

Then it was time for a cheeky 99 ice-cream before heading back. Fab day out, in fact a fab week! When I look at what we managed to cram in I wonder how we managed to get so much done!